Is it wrong to tell your young children that Father Christmas delivers the presents each year?

I had a great discussion on Sunday with a group of young adults about the morality/wisdom of telling your children that Father Christmas exists and delivers their presents each year.

Is it a form of lying? Is it, rather, a kind of mythology or fairy-tale that does no more harm than reading them bedtime stories, and actually does them good in helping them to develop their imagination and sense of wonder? Is it simply harmless? Or does it lead to a traumatic break in child-parent trust when they finally realise that the reality they have been told about by their parents is simply not true?

And – an extra question for Christian parents – if you are telling them stories about Santa Claus and Jesus at the same time, with the same awe-struck tone of voice, does it mean that the Jesus stories crumble as easily as the Santa ones a few years later?

I think your answer partly depends on your own experience. Some people never really believed in Santa anyway; there was some sixth sense that told them it was just a story, an act of make-believe. Some people really are traumatised when they discover The Big Lie that everyone around them has been conspiratorially involved in; and there is a questioning of what it means to trust their parents.

Others, much more low-key, remember a sense of disappointment and minor shock when they found out – they made a connection for themselves, or a big brother or sister told them, or they found the presents in their parents’ wardrobe the week before.

The other issue that came up was the fact that your decision as parents has an influence on others. Does it mean that your enlightened three-year old goes into the play group and tells all the other children it’s all a load of nonsense – to the consternation of the other parents?

Me? I can’t remember ever believing it – Santa Claus; reindeer; coming down the chimney; etc. I’m not saying I never did, I just can’t remember; and I can’t remember a moment of discovering it wasn’t true. My memories, perhaps quite late (5 or 6 years old?) are longing to fall asleep, knowing that mum and dad wouldn’t bring the presents in before then.

Comments please! Did it traumatise you? What do you tell your own children about Santa?

6 Responses

oooooooh sad not to have the wonder and magic and miracles of christmas.

I was filled with a sense of wonder as a child, and even when my siblings grew out of believing, I still believed. I remember at 14 making sooty footprints on the firebricks for my brother who was eight years younger. For us it was Father Christmas (Santa was too American). He was an elderly kind man making gifts for the poorest children. He came down our chimney every year and never stopped.

Funny enough the wonder was just as much in the festive cards adorning the walls, all the beautiful many different types of handwriting conveying messages of Love (my favourites always being the village scenes with the bridge, the lamplight and the church, or Bethlehem below the stars. Neighbours always knocked with offerings of homemade Love on Christmas Eve, and not one year has passed without me putting out a carrot, a mince spy and a sherry. For several years in my now home Father Christmas left a glittery note/card in a plastic sandwich bag thanking the children for the food and being good, a mystery. . . until we received new neighbours and it stopped.

One kind of wonder is so easily translated into another. My children are blessed with the same kind of Christmases’ as I was blessed with, though ours are beautiful because it starts with the nativity in church, and father christmas who is Saint Nicolas will only come after Mummy falls to sleep having returned from Midnight Mass.

p.s The wise men and their gifts and their costumes and the christmas wrapping, and the crib and the baby Jesus, the candles and the carols all intertwine, fusing the make-believe with the real celebration of the gentlest Love personified and triumphant. Such hope.

I was a missionary for Father Christmas! I have a clear memory of a large circle gathered round me in the playground all trying to convince me that he wasn’t real. I just told them how very sorry I was for them in their lack of belief/experience of his reality. And then I remember, aged 8, (possibly even 9), expressing my sadness for my friends’ lack of belief in Fr Christmas to a school helper on the bus coming back from the swimming baths. I can still remember her rather strained and muted sympathy for my position. Telling my mum later that evening, my mum clearly decided that the time had come. I don’t remember being put out. But I was put out when she confessed, (possibly the same evening), that the wonderful thing she and I sometimes played of me standing by the living room and saying abracadabra rather a lot was not actually the reason why the designated magic object, (a bottle of this or that), had moved position in her kitchen. Can you imagine what I would have been like had I known about the Rosary at this age? All this didn’t dent one jot my enthusiastic belief in Jesus and all the Gospel stories.

Perhaps Father Christmas strikes such a chord with children because he is an archtype of The Supreme Gift Giver (and the snow, stars, chimney fire, and so on, are all part of this magical world of creation – which children are often so much more alive to than adults). Perhaps, also, there is something of Father Christmas dropping from the sky into the home, a bit like God becoming incarnate, entering our world from Heaven. That God fills us with such knowledge / aspiration even before we’re formally aware of them. We hunger for God the Gift Bearer and for Jesus Christ even though we formally know of God / Christ. And if we didn’t have Father Christmas, man, inspired by God, would have created another myth instead of Father Christmas reflecting these ideas. That such myths point to something Greater Or not? Don’t know.
And how sin / original sin / dark forces so often obscure us from the magic of God that children, in their innocence, so often aren’t so obscured to / less so.

I got to my teenagers years uncertain of whether Jesus really existed (even historically) or whether it was just another nice story. Perhaps that’s because I went to a state Secondary School. I think many young people are dubious about the Good News because it just seems too good to be true.

My twin sister debunked Santa when we were 10. She pulled me into our parents bedroom (we weren’t allowed in there) prised open a suitcase that was under the bed and showed me our Christmas presents. Up until then the only thing I’d ever questioned about Christmas was why our parents didn’t buy us anything! Why question a good thing?!! Our boys get a small gift from Fr Christmas and a bigger one from us.

My husband says it’s the poor kids who work out first that there’s no Santa. Why else would the child down the road get a bike and they only get clothes?

About this blog

Looking across the landscape of contemporary culture - at the arts, science, religion, politics, philosophy; sorting through the jumble; seeing what stands out, what unsettles, what intrigues, what connects, what sheds light. Father Stephen Wang is a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Westminster, London. He is currently Senior University Chaplain, based at Newman House Catholic Chaplaincy. [Banner photo with kind permission of Matthew Powell]

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